Inferno - Max Hastings [295]
In December 1943, Churchill shifted his support decisively towards the communist leader, who claimed to have 200,000 men under arms. In this, the prime minister was influenced by some illusions: that Tito’s partisans “were not real communists”; that they could be persuaded to forge an accord with King Peter; and that they were single-mindedly committed to the struggle against the Axis. Communist sympathisers in the SOE’s Cairo headquarters contributed to this roseate perception; London was ignorant of the fact that for some months in 1943 Tito negotiated with the Germans for a truce which would enable him to crush Mihailović and committed most of his forces to kill Chetniks. Milovan Djilas was with a group of partisan negotiators who spent some days at German headquarters, where officers professed revulsion at the Yugoslavs’ manner of making war. “Look what you have done to your own country!” they exclaimed. “A wasteland, cinders! Women are begging in the streets, typhus is raging, children are dying of hunger. And we wish to bring you roads, electricity, hospitals.”
Only when Hitler rejected any deal with the communists did conflict resume between partisans and occupiers. The subsequent bloodbath radicalised much of the population, and enabled Tito to create a mass movement. His followers eventually gained control of large rural areas. But they lacked the strength required to take important towns or cities until the Red Army arrived in 1944, and they were as committed as the Chetniks were to achieving postwar domination. Thirty-five Axis divisions were deployed in Yugoslavia, but few were first-line troops, and this concentration reflected Hitler’s obsessive fear of an Allied landing in the Balkans as much as the need to secure the country against Tito. The partisans’ military achievements were less significant than London allowed itself to believe. From late 1943 onwards, the Allies began to send Tito weapons in quantities far larger than those supplied to any other European resistance movement. But most were used to suppress the Chetniks and secure the country for Tito in 1944–45, rather than to kill Germans.
The struggle in Yugoslavia, where so many enmities overlapped, assumed a murderous character and complexity, of which Tito’s deputy Milovan Djilas cited an example. “Covered with orchards and rising from the confluence of two mountain streams, the still undamaged town of Foca seemed to offer charming and peaceful prospects. But the human devastation inside it was immeasurable and inconceivable,” he wrote. “In the spring of 1941 the Ustaše—among them a good number of Moslem toughs—had killed many Serbs. Then the Chetniks … proceeded to slaughter the Moslems. The Ustaše had selected twelve only sons from prominent Serbian families and killed them. While in the village of Miljevina they had slit the throats of Serbs over a vat, apparently so as to fill it with blood instead of fruit pulp. The Chetniks had slaughtered groups of Moslems whom they tied together on the bridge over the Drina and threw into the river. Many of our people saw groups of corpses floating, caught on some rock or log. Some even recognised their own families. Four hundred Serbs and 3,000 Moslems were reported killed in the region of Foca.”
Hapless townspeople and villagers were obliged to endure the presence of partisans living off the land—which meant off their own meagre produce. They saw their valleys turned into battlefields and witnessed the execution of thousands of real and alleged collaborators by one faction or another, together with wholesale slaughters carried out by the Axis occupiers in reprisal for partisan actions. Hatreds were implacable. Almost every community and family suffered loss. Djilas